September 09, 2013

Weekend road trip

For the last couple of years, Boy-in-Black has been telling people, “I’ve got a friend in the CIA.” And it’s true. That’s what one of our extras has been doing. We see him, from time to time, when he's in town, and he usually shows up in the middle of the night.

Long-time readers will remember him as Older Neighbor Boy. That’s what I used to call him back in the days when the Pseudonymous Boy Band jammed in my living room every weekend. Sometimes I called him Snowboarding Neighbor Boy, since he was part of the gang of teenage boys we went to the ski slopes with every Sunday during the winter. But now I guess he’s Chef Extra.

That’s right. He graduated last weekend from the Culinary Institute of America, and we drove down on Saturday for a graduation party. The party was mostly family, but we’ve known Chef Extra long enough to count as family.
We had to take two cars, since there were ten of us.

It wasn’t long before Shaggy Hair Boy and Boy-in-Black began texting between the cars, and soon we were playing the potato game. That’s the game where you send a couple people out of the room, choose a famous person, and then answer questions when they come back into the room. The questions can’t be normal stuff; it’s got to be weird metaphors like, “What vegetable would I be?” or “What musical instrument would I be?” or “What kind of potato would I be?” It’s a game we often play around the campfire, but it can be easily adapted to a car game, especially when everyone in both vehicles has a cell phone for secret conversations.

By the time we arrived at the party, we’d been playing the potato game for four hours. But of course, Boy-in-Black continued the game at the party, just pulling in the other guests, who were mostly standing around in the sunshine, talking and eating. The table on the patio was loaded with incredible food: grilled corn-on-the-cob, piles of pork, barbecued chicken, pasta salad made with pesto, cucumber salad, fruit salad, plus all kind of appetizers.

Eating was main activity of this event. We ate appetizers, then snacks, then a big meal, then more snacks, then leftovers, then dessert. Even simple foods were amazing, like the fruit salad in which fruits had been carefully chosen and diced and marinated in juices. The cake was filled with strawberries and cream. By the time we left the party to go to our hotel, I felt saturated with sunshine and conversation and good food.

6 comments:

oooooh, the trip down memory late that reading that old post and the comments -- I commented! A long one as always!!! [Oh, how lovely it is to have at least one blogging friend who hasn't deleted, edited, or changed her blog and where we can happily do some "time travel" and meet ourselves back in 2006!!! Thanks!! And I do the same back, obviously. ;-) ]

Well, congrats to the CIA graduate, better than being at the other CIA... sigh. :-)